Opinion: Nursery trade secrets

Imagine arriving at your supermarket and finding members of a rival brand advising on how best they should display their goods. Or perhaps booking into a hotel belonging to a major chain and seeing the desk clerk being led by someone from a highly competitive rival on customer relationship training. Does this sound plausible? If your answer is the same as mine, it's 'no'. Why give away techniques and confidential information which had taken time, energy and a great deal of expense to develop? In a competitive environment, this intellectual property or...